To the Barricades by Alix Kates Shulman

Author:Alix Kates Shulman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

12

A Home for Lost Dogs

Emma Goldman does not merely preach the new philosophy; she also persists in living it,—and that is the one supreme, unforgivable crime.

—HIPPOLYTE HAVEL

With President McKinley, America had buried the nineteenth century. The twentieth century, and its first United States president, Theodore Roosevelt, brought a new spirit to the land. It was the spirit of progress, reform, and modernity. Telephones, telegraphs, automobiles, electric lights suddenly began to be commonplace, giving the new era a special look and sound and feel. A new gusto and vitality stirred the nation. Everything seemed possible. Shouting exuberantly “I feel like a bull moose!” President Roosevelt proclaimed the spirit of the new era.

In the early decades of the century the word “new” itself was used for everything. Preachers preached a New Theology. The New Immigrants were crowding into the cities. Politics brought a New Nationalism and, later, a New Freedom. Newly launched magazines sported names like the New Republic and the New Democracy. In the salons of the new “bohemian” sections of the larger cities, the New Drama, New Poetry, New Criticism, and New Painting were discussed and practiced by artists, writers, and intellectuals. The “Progressive Era” was underway.

In 1903, as the public furor over Emma began to subside, she moved to a small cold-water flat at 210 East Thirteenth Street. There she would live for a decade, right in the thick of New York’s sparkling Greenwich Village, where the new, heady spirit was fomenting. In those years in Greenwich Village “leaped a new generation so dashingly alive,” wrote Alfred Kazin, a historian of the period, “that it was ever afterward to think it had been a youth movement.” Emma’s apartment, tagged by a friend a “home for lost dogs,” became one of the centers of the new spirit. “There was always someone sleeping in the front, someone who had stayed too late and lived too far away or who was too shaky on his feet and needed cold compresses or who had no home to go to,” she wrote. It was a place where friends could drink coffee “black as the night, strong as the revolutionary ideal, sweet as love.”

Only, for Emma, little that went on there seemed especially new. The twentieth century’s New Woman, practicing the New Morality and demanding the right to vote, was less daring than Emma had been most of her life. The New Psychology of Sigmund Freud that everyone was suddenly discussing had been familiar to Emma since 1895, when she had attended Freud’s lectures in Vienna. The New Drama of Shaw, Ibsen, and Strindberg Emma had discovered on her own back in 1895. In fact, it was Emma’s lectures on modern drama, later published as The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914), that had helped to popularize the New Drama in America. Emma had always been so far in the vanguard that she seemed to one journalist to be “about eight thousand years ahead of her age.” The only new things in her own life at the time were her alias, E.

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